SSD Battles: Corsair X128 vs. Solutions on JMicron Chip. Page 5

At this time SSD performance is determined by the controllers they are built on and firmware versions they use. We are already very well familiar with SSDs on Intel, Indillinx and Samsung controllers. Today time has come to talk about the solutions using JMicron chips.

Performance in Intel IOMeter

Sequential Read & Write Patterns

IOMeter is sending a stream of read and write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed each minute, so that we could see the dependence of the drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the processed data block. This test is indicative of the maximum speed the drive can achieve.

The numeric data can be viewed in tables by clicking the links below. We will discuss graphs and diagrams.

The PQI falls behind the other JMicron-based products when reading large data blocks. It obviously has the same number of channels as the others, so this must be the influence of the flash memory chips installed in it. The SSDs based on the JMicron controller are overall slower than their opponents with both small and large data blocks.

The X128 is inferior to the X25-M as well as to the P128 on small data chunks but outperforms the latter on data blocks larger than 16KB. It cannot catch up with the Intel SSD, though.

Corsair’s SSDs are ahead at sequential writing. Despite different controllers, they have almost identical speeds on most of data blocks. The Intel is about as fast as the leaders on small blocks but reaches its top speed sooner. The low speed of sequential writing is a characteristic trait of Intel’s SSDs with MLC flash memory.

The JMicron-based products go neck and neck up to 64KB data blocks. The controller and the page-based memory access mode obviously limit the performance of the Transcend drive. It does take a spurt on large data blocks, though. While the same-controller models can only catch up with the X25-M (the Apacer is a little bit ahead of the PQI again), the Transcend with SLC memory is 50% faster! On the other hand, it cannot overtake the leaders as the controller proves to be more important than the memory type even under such simple load.